“Should It?” - A New BDD Tool, Pain Not Included!

Nice insight on some of the troubles BBC had with their tools. Although I still don't really know what "ShouldIt" does, this might be because I'm new to BDD.

Enjoyed this a lot, a different perspective. Having used Behat a lot before and discovered the Cucumber pain as a result, I was interested to see that others have had the same issues. The Markdown seems like a nice solution. Also enjoyed your presentation style. I would have liked to see some more detail on "real world" implementation and also on how it affected your takeup within the BBC and resultant test coverage, but overall very good - thanks!

Very good talk, tackles the main reason why BDD isn't very well bought-in. Looking forward to having a peek on Should It on github.io

Thank you for this good talk about why BDD is so painful and opensourcing ShouldIT as a solution to run tests against written Acceptance Criteria.

The tool suggested looks really useful for rapid tests, but the presenters passive aggressive and intimidating approach prohibited any valuable discussion. Instead of an attack on BDD, the talk would be more engaging if the talk was about this new tool and how to use it. The talk was interesting, and the speaker was good, but the whole thing was a bit of a straw man argument without much to takeaway other than "BDD sucks". But, it was provocative and may help people reassess if BDD is really working for them. Sorry, I just didn't find it constructive, on the whole.

A really interesting perspective and a tool. Talk also briefly touched couple of important points about different levels of testing and amount of required details in the communication. That said, most of the talk was dedicated to blaming a tool instead of actually focusing on the underlying testing and development processes change that actually did end up solving the problem.

The purpose of the tool didn't become clear during the takl. It looks more like an aggregator of different testing tools than something actually related to BDD. In the end, the problem was solved by changing the testing approach rather than by the change in tooling. The presentation style was, as mentioned by other reviewers, aggressive and off putting.

I enjoyed Richard's presenting style. I didn't agree with all of the points made, and I agree with other commenters here that more detailed examples of real world of should-it are needed.

He made the solution through his actual experience. It brought by his observation, what's the real problem behind. Some may agree some may differ. Denying existing method is not an attack. It's a process of KAIZEN. I like his passion to move things forward.

I personally found this talk a little hard to follow.

Thanks every one for the constructive criticism. I knew I might upset people in the room before I started but that was definitely not my goal.

On reflection I know I should have spent a LOT less time mentioning the pain Cucumber caused us and a LOT more time showing you how good and easy it is to use 'ShouldIT?'.

'ShouldIT?' is just around the corner from being released on Github. I am keen to carrying on sharing about it because it has genuinely helped me to do spec based BDD development more rapidly whilst still having confidence I am delivering software to the specification provided. I will probably write some blog posts and maybe even some screencasts to emphasise some of the points that were perhaps missing from the talk.

@everzet has also been kind enough to reach out with advice on how this talk can be tailored to be more positive for the community.

Thanks again..

Good eye opener that failures are happening and We need to learn from them. I can't understand why did speaker focused too much on blaming cucumber and bringing too much negative vibe to this talk. I am looking forward to try shouldit

I have my doubts about the product.

However I think the speech itself was pretty well delivered especially since he had @everzet sitting right in front of him shaking his head through majority of the speech. That couldn't be exactly easy to deal with.

Interesting talk, but as others have already pointed out (and Richard has commented himself), it focused too much on the problems experienced with Cucumber and not enough on the solution that was developed.

Would like to see more about "Should It" make it's way into the talk.

It was really good to hear that companies as big as the BBC are putting these things into practice and open sourcing the solutions they come up with, even if they don't current endorse this talk ;)

Thanks Richard

Found the presenter's honesty very refreshing :)

I considered the talk as being an example of a different take on BDD which works for the BBC Sport team, rather than an attack on Behat, cucumber or BDD in general. I enjoyed the speaker's style too. That said, I think I came away not fully understanding everything the tool can do. A bit more time spent on the new tool would probably have been beneficial.